Thirty Rooms To Hide In (14 page)

At the Millstone we had no father figure and when a sane adult male drifted into our lives we swarmed him like a lifeboat. There were two such men in our world – the Tony’s.

One was Dr. Tony Bianco, himself an orthopedic surgeon at the Clinic and head of his own large household of seven just down the road. The other man we looked up to – often literally – was our dentist, Dr. Tony Lund.

In Dr. Lund’s waiting room I’d page through the
Children’s Highlight
magazines, stare at the goldfish in his quiet aquarium, and actually look forward to being with this man who whistled cheerfully as he stuck needles in my head and ran drill bits over the nerve highway connected to the center of my brain. Dr. Lund was simply a likeable person.

My father thought so too and if the insular Roger Sullivan could be said to have had a best friend, it was this talkative, gregarious, huggy man – Tony Lund. He and his wife Mary were soon going out for dinner with Roger and Myra and on one of these outings they gathered for a ride down the Mississippi aboard the Lund’s houseboat, the
Sneaky Pete
.

It was a small craft, not grand by any means; more like a floating motel room and moored in nearby Winona, Minnesota. Drifting down the river, the vista moved my father to say, “Tony, I’d love to own one of these things. It would add umpteen years to my life.”

That was 1964. Dad died in ’66, so umpteen apparently equals 2. Roger bought one anyway and our houseboat, the
Lethe
, was soon bobbing alongside the
Sneaky Pete
. We’d pile into the family station wagon on Friday afternoons for the hour trip east and by 3pm the
Lethe
was in the water and Dad was behind the wheel half in the bag.

With enough booze, even a strip-mining executive can go all John Muir on you and Dad was no different. After a few tumblers of liquid conversation, he’d wax beatific on the timeless beauty of the river and I’d get the “Have-you-ever-really-
looked
-at-a-sunset?” speech, delivered with that condescending earnestness of the florid drunk whose cerebellum is on auto-pilot.

Auto-pilot would’ve been a nice feature for the houseboat actually, considering the captain was seeing two rivers and trying to drive between them. At the end of one particular excursion my mother could tell Dad wasn’t capable of pulling the boat safely into the dock.

“I walked around to the side of the boat where the housing hid me from Roger’s view,” recalls my mother, “and pantomimed our plight to Tony across the water on the
Sneaky Pete
.”

When Tony understood what was happening, he gave the wheel to his wife and did a Double-O Seven leap from his deck to ours. Somehow he managed to get Dad away from the wheel to guide us in safely and did it without us kids knowing how close we came to appearing on the local news.

It was on the houseboat where Dad first accused Tony Lund of having an affair with my mother. Roger and Tony were relaxing on deck chairs watching Myra walk down the dock to retrieve a life-vest when my father said, “Why don’t you just get it over with and screw her?”

Tony was a children’s dentist and this may have explained his hesitancy to rearrange Roger’s teeth. It was his good nature however to respond with only a gentle, “What are you saying? Don’t
do
this, Roger.” When I call Tony Lund to learn more about this incident, I can almost hear him shaking his head as he remembers it. “I loved your dad. I really did, but this was, well, it was too much.”

Both my mother and Tony are certain Roger’s jealousy surfaced the year before at Rochester’s annual Beaux Arts Ball. It was on this night that Tony, after waltzing with his wife Mary, asked Myra for a dance.

“He was such a marvelous dancer,” recalls Mom. “I could just shut my brain off and go.”

Tony takes pains, needlessly, to assure me there was no affair. “But your mother could dance well and I remember what a great time we had at that first ball.”

“Looking back,” says Myra, “Roger must’ve just been consumed by insecurities. He had so little confidence he couldn’t even let himself believe he had a loyal wife.”

It was at the second Beaux Arts Ball in 1964 my father pushed Tony too far. The evening started off with drinks at the Lund’s house with everybody dressed formally for the big to-do. Tony took a photo of my father, using his new Polaroid camera and remembers, “Your dad, he’d had a snoot-full before we even left for the ball.”

At the Kahler Hotel downtown, my parents and the Lund’s were seated at a large table for eight and – as the
Alcoholic’s Guide To Ruining Evenings
suggests – Dad started throwing the drinks back before the food arrived. One drink followed another while the table guests covertly locked eyes and formed conversational couplets on either side of Roger to avoid getting trapped with him. Set adrift on the table without a close audience, Roger mumbled things to the general vicinity and, if not for the tux and ballroom surroundings, could’ve been mistaken for a street drunk talking to his haircut.

There are different levels of difficulty achieved in alcoholic stunts; it’s kinda like competitive diving. There’s the smaller stunts: inappropriate jokes or, say, throwing up while waiting for the valet. But accusing your wife and best friend of having an affair – publicly – that’s the triple gainer of Evening Ruiners
and Dad threw one flawlessly. Roger’s accusations were overheard by everyone at the table, including Tony.

“I didn’t come back at him right away but waited for the appropriate time,” Tony remembers. “When he got up to go to the bathroom I went in right behind him. I took his shirt in my fists and
lifted
him right off the floor, slamming him hard against the wall.

I mean, I really slammed him, Luke.”

Tony back-pedals a little bit here, caught between the memory and the realization he’s recounting it to Roger’s son. “You know, I’m generally a pretty easy-going fellow, but with something as bad as this …well, I just told him, ‘Roger, don’t you ever,
ever
say that again.’ I turned around and walked out.”

* * *

With a beep, the Polaroid image Tony took of my father that night arrives as promised in my e-mail. On my screen, the internet downloads the picture from top to bottom like an upside-down theatre curtain unveiling a scene from another era. The four men in tuxes have period haircuts and eyeglasses and it looks like the office Christmas party at Houston’s Mission Control. The thick black eyeglasses, the high-and-tight buzz cuts, it’s all very nineteen-sixty-five. My eyes, of course, go to my father.

I lean into the screen to scrutinize his face and the closeness sparks a memory of kisses that don’t count; affection triggered by chemicals and given through a veil of bourbon mist.

It is strange to discover a picture of my father outside of the familiar images in the box of family photos; like it’s a deleted scene from a movie I know well. Stranger still is the knowledge he is drunk at the very moment the picture was taken. Here it is, the thing itself, captured on film like a Jim-Beam Sasquatch a bare ninety minutes before a legendary stunt. This is what I’ve been looking for. This is Him. The thing I’d heard through the walls yelling at Mom. Shouldn’t there be music swelling here, a flash of memory
? (“That’s the face, that’s the face!”)
But the cotton padding of years protect me. It is only a picture of a man. The memory is there; the emotion, frozen inside the amber.